The L Word
by Azrael DiAngelo
Summary: Sometimes when Cas wakes up with nightmares, he can only be lulled back to sleep by the sound of Dean's voice. When Cas has fallen asleep and no one's listening to him, Dean takes advantage.


"Why are you still here, Cas?" Dean asks the angel in bed next to him. He doesn't expect a reply; he had just helped Castiel fall asleep again after a bad nightmare.

Cas had woken up screaming Dean's name repeatedly, kicking and punching his hallucinated enemies. It took twenty minutes to reassure him that he was safely wrapped within Dean's arms and another twenty to get him back to sleep. His head now droops in Dean's lap, his hair sticking out in several places as Dean soothingly strokes it with his fingers, praying that this doesn't end up being another restless night.

"Have I ever told you that you are the most stubborn son of a bitch I have ever met?" Dean asks, wiping the sweat beading from Cas' scalp on to his pants. He shrugs. "Well, probably besides myself."

He pauses for a moment, letting his thoughts circulate like the blood pumping through Cas' body, the only indication that he's alive other than the warm breath emitting through each occasional snore on Dean's inner thigh.

"Even after you've seen me ripping souls apart in Hell and getting off on it, you still look as me if I gave you life," he whispers, glancing at the shadows the cracks of the motel window leave in the darkness.

The room was eerily quiet without Sam, who had insisted on booking a room down the hall. He had said something along the lines of, "You have your angel, I have mine," a statement that Dean really didn't want to ponder too deeply.

"How can you look at me like that when all I do is kill everyone I lo—" He couldn't say it. The word was a sweet poison with a painful antidote. Once you say something like that to someone, the responsibility of having said it affects everything about yourself from your behavior all the way down to your outlook on life. Then comes the time where the other person doesn't like this change in you and wants to cure you of this affliction, and the only way to do that is to take everything you said back.

Dean wants to slap himself, but he doesn't want to interrupt the rhythmic petting thing he has going on with Cas here. "What I'm trying to tell you is, as cliché as this may sound, you were created to do greater things than just shacking up with a nobody. I mean, you're an angel for Christ's sake!"

Dean soaks up the image of his best friend sprawled over most of the bed, wrapped up in a cocoon of all their blankets. The sight of him warms him up drastically more than the sheets do. Cas' decision to close Heaven was an inevitable step in making the world a safer place, but choosing to stay with him and Sam with no chance of returning just makes Dean nauseous.

"You don't deserve the hell I give you."

"Dean?"

Dean freezes where he sits, all muscles taut and eyes unblinking as a tidal wave of dread crashes and sinks within his gut. He groans. Oh God, how much did Cas hear? Well, at least he hadn't gone on to make this a sappy love confession. But boy was he about to have the most awkward midnight conversation.

"Stop eating the honey, Dean. We need to save the bees," Cas urges drowsily, letting out a snore a few seconds later.

Dean sighs in relief. He tosses his head back against the pillows and laughs as he tries to picture what Cas might be dreaming about. He hasn't talked about bees with much enthusiasm since he we went insane after the whole Leviathan gig, but Dean thinks that Cas still has a soft spot for the fuzzy little things. Either that, or honey was another name for something sexy. Which, ok, he probably shouldn't be focusing on while Cas' head is in his lap.

He isn't sure if it's him or the nostalgia that the silence of the middle of the night grants his brain, but he's feeling a bit more open than usual. "My mom used to tuck me in bed every night and tell me that angels are watching over us, though you probably already know that." He stops, remembering the woman who had tried to distance herself from the world that he could never truly leave. Damn it, his eyes are tearing up again. The last guy who stayed here must've snuck a cat in. Damn allergies.

"I never believed in angels. I always thought that if these feathery guardians really gave a fuck about me, I wouldn't have the life that I'm living now. Mom and I were both right. Angels are watching over us and they are dicks."

Dean shivers as a draft blows against his exposed skin. He gently lifts Cas' head, making sure not to disrupt his now calm dreams, and places him on a small mountain of pillows that Dean had to pay extra in order to acquire. He reluctantly rolls out of bed and briskly walks to the window illuminated by moonlight, hoping to make this interruption brief. He slams the window shut; nothing could be done about the wind escaping through the cracked glass, but Dean settles for temporarily dealing with that rather than having no window at all.

He makes his way back to bed, positioning himself and Cas the same way as before, and jumps right back in to his monologue. "Angel are dicks, but not you. You're special, Cas. I need you to know that. You can pluck any junkless douchebag from the pearly gates and they could never begin to replace you." He begins to stumble over his own tongue, as if he's listing every crime he's committed in front of a live audience; as if he needs to prove himself guilty. "I'm—I'm serious, they could never be as, um, important to me as you are."

"They wouldn't look like you either," he says, inspecting the angel in question. He continues to stroke Cas' hair and hum Metallica under his breath whenever he isn't blurting out things he has kept bottled up for a long time. "Even 2014 Cas was barely recognizable."

"See, you have these huge fucking sky blue eyes. It's like when you were sitting on your little cloud up there your eyes absorbed all of the pretty blues you saw in the world. Shit, that sounded like some crappy Lifetime shit." He shakes his head and goes on, a smile slowly growing between his cheeks. "There's also that cute little smirk that you do when you've actually done something funny but you won't admit to it."

His voice breaks and his speech falters. "I—I guess what I'm trying to say is—"

"I need you too, Dean," Cas says, completely lucid. Though his face shines in awe of all the kind words Dean has bestowed upon him, his voice states certainty. He says it as if he'll stay. He says it as if they'll be okay.

Dean grins from freckled ear to freckled ear.

_You often joke and say that the day we leave each other_

_would be the beginning of the apocalypse_

_but you seem to forget that the beginning of the end_

_was the day that I met you_

_and I have been flying back to you ever since_

_(gg)_


End file.
